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Storm Surge – Adam Sobel

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Storm Surge

Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future

Adam Sobel

Genre: Environment

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Harper Wave

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


A renowned scientist takes us through the devastating and unprecedented events of Hurricane Sandy, using it to explain our planet’s changing climate, and what we need to do to protect ourselves and our cities for the future. Was Hurricane Sandy a freak event—or a harbinger of things to come?  Was climate change responsible?  What connects the spiraling clouds our satellites saw from space, the brackish water that rose up over the city’s seawalls, and the slow simmer of greenhouse gases? Why weren't we better prepared? In this fascinating and accessible work of popular science, atmospheric scientist and Columbia University professor Adam Sobel addresses these questions, combining scientific explanation with first-hand experience of the event itself. He explains the remarkable atmospheric conditions that gave birth to Sandy and determined its path. He gives us insight into the sophisticated science that led to the forecasts of the storm before it hit, as well as an understanding of why our meteorological vocabulary failed our leaders in warning us about this unprecedented storm—part hurricane, part winter-type nor’easter, fully deserving of the title “Superstorm.” Storm Surge brings together the melting glaciers, the shifting jet streams, and the warming oceans to make clear how our changing climate will make New York and other cities more vulnerable than ever to huge storms—and how we need to think differently about these long-term risks if we hope to mitigate the damage. Engaging, informative, and timely, Sobel’s book provokes us to rethink the future of our climate and how we can better prepare for the storms to come.

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Storm Surge – Adam Sobel

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New York just blew a $390 billion-shaped hole in the fossil fuel industry.

For a country that already imports 99 percent of its oil, France’s decision to end all new oil development and phase out existing projects by 2040 may not seem all that meaningful. The Guardian called it a “largely symbolic gesture.”

But actually, as geoscientist Erik Klemetti noted, France is committing to keeping a massive oil reservoir in the ground. The Paris Basin, a region in northern France, may contain nearly as much underground petroleum as the huge Bakken Formation in North Dakota. Extracting that oil and gas would require extensive fracking.

Klemetti calculates that France could extract 100 years worth of oil for the country by fully exploring the Paris Basin — which could contain, according to the top estimate, 5 billion barrels of oil. At current oil prices (around $58 per barrel), that’s worth about $290 billion.

Instead, France decided to say au revoir to oil and gas altogether.

Earlier this year, the country also announced it would ban internal combustion engines by 2040. With decisions like these, France is positioning itself on the right side of history. And it’s sending a message to a world that’s floundering on climate change: A more just and prosperous future is possible, and it doesn’t require the dirty fuels of the past.

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New York just blew a $390 billion-shaped hole in the fossil fuel industry.

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How Climate Change Will Alter New York City’s Skyline

green4us

A warming world means big changes in the Big Apple. T photography/Shutterstock Last week, the New York City Panel on Climate Change released a new report detailing exactly how climate scientists expect New York City to change over over the next 100 years, focusing on projected increases in temperature and sea level. Sea level rise will certainly transform the shape of the city’s coastline. But Manhattan’s edges are basically a man-made pile of garbage already—they can go ahead and disintegrate. What climate will really change is the true shape of New York: Its iconic skyline, and the buildings in it. New York has a head start on adapting its buildings to its flooded future. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the city made zoning changes to support elevating homes, and mandated that new construction and substantial alterations meet the newest flood maps. “Flooding issues were felt most strongly after Sandy,” says Russell Unger, president of the Urban Green Council. “There was a vigorous response to adapt the building and zoning codes.” But those changes won’t be nearly enough. Last week’s report estimates that average annual rainfall in New York City will increase between 5 and 13 percent by the 2080s. Sea levels could be as high as six feet by 2100, doubling the area of the city currently at risk for severe flooding. And that’s without taking into account results published this week in Nature that found coastal sea level north of New York City had jumped temporarily by more than five inches between 2009-2010—an extreme, unprecedented event scientists partially blame on climate change. Read the rest at Wired.

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How Climate Change Will Alter New York City’s Skyline

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How Climate Change Will Alter New York City’s Skyline

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In Rockaways, Infusion of Sand Will Soon Raise Beaches Hit by a Hurricane

This month, a contractor will start to dredge and spread 2.9 million cubic yards of sand on a six-mile strand in Queens. View original post here: In Rockaways, Infusion of Sand Will Soon Raise Beaches Hit by a Hurricane ; ;Related ArticlesNew York Will Consider Nonlethal Ways to Reduce Swan PopulationPeter Rona, 79, Dies; Explorer Found Hot Springs on Ocean FloorAsh Spill Shows How Watchdog Was Defanged ;

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In Rockaways, Infusion of Sand Will Soon Raise Beaches Hit by a Hurricane

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It’s Been One Year Since Sandy. Are We Prepared for the Next Big Storm?

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It’s Been One Year Since Sandy. Are We Prepared for the Next Big Storm?

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Into the Gyre

A team of artists and scientists traveled to Alaska to document water pollution. Carl Safina, an ecologist and Mark Dion, an artist, talk about their observations from the trip. Originally posted here: Into the Gyre ; ;Related ArticlesIs there anything more authentic than a child’s drawing asking us to preserve our oceans?Tracking This Year’s Dismally Small Monarch MigrationMystery Lung Fungus: Are You at Risk? ;

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Into the Gyre

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Climate-Related Power Outages Aren’t Just a Coastal Problem

Mother Jones

This story first appeared in The Atlantic Cities and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Eerie images of flooded, pitch-black lower Manhattan following Superstorm Sandy made it clear just how stark an effect climate change and extreme weather can have on our everyday access to electricity.

A report from the US Department of Energy released on last week shows that New York City and other coastal regions aren’t the only ones at risk. And it’s not just a question of the future. No American region, it turns out, has been exempt from the possibility of mass power outages. The report focuses on three major causes: rising temperatures; wider-spread, more severe droughts; and more devastating flooding, storms, and sea level rises.

DOE also created a map of energy and power-related disruptions over the past decade that experts have attributed to large-scale, long-term disruptions in climate and weather patterns (for the full, interactive map, click here).

Department of Energy

Several memorable mass power failures make the list, including Sandy, 2004’s Hurricane Jeanne, and this February’s major New England blizzard. The map also includes less-publicized and less obviously catastrophic events in which climate change had an impact on the US power grid. For example, drought conditions and low water levels on the Mississippi River last summer made it difficult for barges to transport resources like coal and petroleum. On the other end of the spectrum, flooding of the Yellowstone River in Montana ripped open an oil pipeline in July 2011, causing $135 million in property damages.

Droughts and extreme heat have made it more difficult for power plants to do their job. Storms and rising sea levels put the physical power grid, including power plants and individual power lines, at risk in places ranging from coastal communities to Tornado Alley. And, to make it all worse, rising temperatures will continue to put an ever-increasing strain on electricity resources.

As part of the climate change initiative launched in June by President Obama, the report offers several recommendations to help mitigate these trends. Long-term suggestions include new technologies to make power plants more efficient, increased emergency back-up systems for local power grids, and strategies to reduce the amount of energy consumers need.

In the meantime, it’s clear that inland communities have as much to worry about in terms of climate change as the coasts.

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Climate-Related Power Outages Aren’t Just a Coastal Problem

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As the House votes on Sandy aid, dudgeon and hypocrisy are in full effect

As the House votes on Sandy aid, dudgeon and hypocrisy are in full effect

Do you remember superstorm Sandy? Big storm that happened last year. Wiped out a bunch of houses; knocked out the transportation system in the nation’s largest city for a week. If you do remember it, you’ll be glad to hear that word of the disaster has finally reached Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital.

SandyRelief

Today (already!) the House of Representatives will leap into action on providing aid to affected communities. We outlined how the vote was expected to go last week. Fox News provides an update:

The base $17 billion bill by the House Appropriations Committee is aimed at immediate Sandy recovery needs, including $5.4 billion for New York and New Jersey transit systems and $5.4 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief aid fund.

Northeast lawmakers will have a chance to add to that bill with an amendment by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., for an additional $33.7 billion, including $10.9 billion for public transportation projects. …

“We have more than enough votes, I’m confident of that,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., claiming strong support from Democrats and Republicans from the Northeast and other states for both the base $17 billion bill and the amendment for the additional $33.7 billion.

Well, we’ll see about that. I haven’t whipped the Congress, but I’ve seen enough of this House GOP to know that they won’t spend a dime on New York liberals without throwing some sort of tantrum.

Credit where it’s due, however. When the House passed the first part of a relief package, some $9.7 billion to support an almost-broke FEMA, a number of Republican lawmakers opposed the measure. One has changed his mind. From Talking Points Memo:

A little more than a week ago, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) was one of only 67 Republicans to vote against a bill to provide $9.7 billion in relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy that easily passed the House of Representatives. In a letter sent Monday to those very GOP members, Palazzo called on them to reverse their votes and help pass a larger Sandy aid measure that will be considered by the House this week.

Palazzo was the focus of online outrage, given his advocacy for aid to his home district after Hurricane Sandy. What changed his mind? The same thing that convinced people in New York to accept climate change.

[A] tour last week through Sandy-affected areas in the Northeast prompted a change of heart in Palazzo, who also delivered a floor speech Monday in support of a reform bill that would expedite the process by which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can distribute disaster aid.

Here, Palazzo speaks from the floor about his change of heart.

If you see this as a good sign, that opposition has fallen to 66 votes, be warned. The House will almost certainly approve the $17 billion proposed today. But the fight over that $33.7 billion could be ferocious. That $33 billion includes funding that would also provide initial support for the region to prepare for another significant storm — one key reason that the House bailed on providing aid in the first place.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) outlines the argument. Again from Talking Points Memo:

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) on Tuesday explained why he intends to vote against a larger Hurricane Sandy relief package that will be taken up by the House of Representatives, arguing that the debt was “much, much smaller” when disaster aid was provided by the federal government in the past.

Appearing on CNN’s “Starting Point,” Mulvaney said he believes that providing disaster relief is “a proper and appropriate function of the government,” but his qualms with the Sandy relief bill stem from its lack of spending offsets. Mulvaney was one of 67 members, all Republicans, who voted against the initial $9.7 billion Sandy aid legislation that passed the House on Jan. 4.

To translate: Mulvaney wants to help! Seriously, he does! But when the government has helped before, the debt wasn’t so big. So instead of providing a tiny fraction of the federal budget to help people in need, we can only afford a very tiny fraction of it. Unless there are “offsets,” which is South Carolinian for “cuts to social services.”

Mulvaney’s best line, though, was this: “We simply cannot continue to do what we’ve done in the past. That’s how we arrived where we are.”

He did not mean this ironically. Mulvaney argues that we haven’t taken preventative action aimed at curtailing our problems, so he will not support efforts to take preventative action to curtail our problems.

Every decision made on Capitol Hill is political, of course, and there’s no reason to assume that this one wouldn’t be. But the slow, grudging process of bringing this bill to the floor, the moralizing and false outrage it has prompted, have been a black mark on the House of Representatives. Happily for the members, the body is already so smudged that one more mark is barely even visible.

Update: In a statement during the debate, Rep. Mulvaney says we didn’t need to worry about how to pay for the aid Congress appropriated after Hurricane Hugo (which hit his state) because debt was only $3 trillion. It’s not clear how much debt triggers his arbitrary distinction.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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As the House votes on Sandy aid, dudgeon and hypocrisy are in full effect

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Sandy’s aftermath: Economy, jobs, housing hit hard — but for how long?

Sandy’s aftermath: Economy, jobs, housing hit hard — but for how long?

Last Friday, the government released its first assessment of the nation’s employment since Hurricane Sandy. Surprisingly, the data suggested that the storm hadn’t had much impact on unemployment figures, a point called out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “[O]ur survey response rates in the affected states were within normal ranges,” the agency wrote. “Our analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy did not substantively impact the national employment and unemployment estimates for November.”

Full state data comes out later this month, which may show a different picture for New York and New Jersey. There’s external evidence of an effect: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) suggests that the region saw 50,000 people in New York state lose jobs due to the storm and Moody’s says the number could be 86,000 across the region. The BLS’ data itself already shows an effect from the storm, as noted by Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic. Here is a graph he created showing the number of people, in thousands, who missed work due to weather last month.

The Atlantic

That’s more than twice any month prior.

The New York Times reported this weekend that the storm resulted in the complete loss of thousands of jobs in lower Manhattan — and that the negative economic effects of Sandy are ongoing.

There is no official tally, but local leaders estimated that a few thousand small businesses had been shuttered or were operating at less than full strength since the storm and that as many as 10,000 jobs had been lost, at least temporarily. About 3,000 apartments in Lower Manhattan remain uninhabitable, according to Daniel L. Squadron, a Democratic state senator who represents the area.

The Times describes one small business owner’s struggle.

Amanda Byron Zink has been trying to keep her dog-grooming business going even though her shop, the Salty Paw in South Street Seaport, could be washed out for months, and possibly for good. Ms. Zink and some of the groomers who worked in her shop have been operating temporarily from the basement of an animal hospital near the Seaport, but she said they “can only do little guys” because they only have a small sink to bathe the dogs in.

The Salty Paw was in the Historic Front Street development, which took on so much water that it will be closed for months. The complex of shops and apartments was powered by a set of geothermal wells drilled deep into the bedrock of Manhattan. The flood water, which Ms. Zink said rose to 11 feet in her ground-level salon, swamped the heating and electrical systems in the basement, she said.

Ms. Zink said she had received no payments from her insurance company even though she was covered for business interruption. Like most of the small businesses around hers, she had no flood insurance.

This is what the South Street Seaport looked like this weekend, six weeks after the storm.

Lower Manhattan is one of the more economically diverse areas of the city, the high-rises surrounding Wall Street within blocks of the historically low-income districts of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. As we mentioned last week, the area is also home to a number of large public housing complexes. In an exceptionally disturbing piece of reporting this morning, the Times also assessed the city’s far-too-slow efforts to meet the needs of low-income residents trapped in towers with no water or electricity. Even today, the problem persists in areas of the city closer to the ocean.

Hurricane Sandy put few agencies in the region to a more daunting test than it did the New York City Housing Authority — the nation’s biggest public landlord — as 402 of its buildings [PDF] housing 77,000 residents lost electricity and elevators, with most of them also losing heat and hot water. These lifelines were cut in some of the city’s most isolated spots, like Coney Island, Red Hook and the Rockaways.

An examination by The New York Times has found that while the agency moved aggressively before the storm to encourage residents to leave, particularly those who were disabled and the needy, both it and the city government at large were woefully unprepared to help its residents deal with Hurricane Sandy’s lingering aftermath.

The damage was immediate and extensive — as was evidence of the lack of preparation.

Around the city, 26 of the housing authority’s basement boiler rooms had flooded, destroying the equipment there, and leaving 34,565 apartments without heat and hot water. The electrical systems of many buildings, already in marginal shape because of delayed maintenance, were also devastated by flooding. Having power restored would not be enough: in about 95 buildings, temporary generators and boilers would be needed until the electrical systems could be rebuilt.

Water stopped flowing in many high-rise buildings above the sixth floor. Stairwells and hallways were pitch black. But because there was no up-to-date survey of electrical needs, the Army Corps of Engineers, called in to help install generators five days after the storm, first had to visit 100 authority buildings simply to determine what kind of generator each needed.

One senior advisor to the mayor largely placed the blame on the residents.

“We called for mandatory evacuation,” Howard Wolfson, another deputy mayor, said. “We did not do that assuming that the flood would reach someone on the 10th floor of a building — we did that because of some concern that there could well be outages of power, heat and water. Our hope, expectation and goal is people would leave these buildings.”

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A damaged hotel in the Rockaways.

Some city residents are now pre-evacuating areas that could be at risk in future storms. This morning, the New York Post reported on people moving out of the city’s Zone A, the area most at risk to flooding (though that zone designation is likely too small).

Asset Manager Greg Sperrazza, 25, had no choice but to look for another place after his luxury condo on 2 Gold St in the Financial District flooded with 31 feet of salt water, destroying the furnaces and back up generators. He’s looking to buy uptown because he thinks investing in property downtown is risky. …

And realtors are feeling the heat from desperate downtowners. Corcoran Vice President Victoria Terri-Cote said a recent open house for a one bedroom on sale for $869,000 on 71 East 77th Street drew in 15 people between the ages of 25 and 30 years old who after one week of crashing uptown decided it’s not that stuffy.

“Luxury condo.” “On sale for $869,000.” Those who are looking to move out of the most at-risk areas are, as always, those most capable of absorbing the economic shock, those with the means to move. If someone wasn’t able to temporarily evacuate his home with the storm bearing down on the city, the likelihood that he can spend three-quarters of a million dollars on a new place on the Upper East Side is slim.

The storm only made that prospect harder. Walking in lower Manhattan after the storm, it was stunning to see how the normally bustling streets of the area had become silent. The livelihoods of an uncountable number of people came to a sharp stop when the power went out. Even with it restored, the lack of phone service and a smaller customer base means economic disruption.

Sandy revealed the fragility of the livelihoods and housing of thousands of already at-risk residents. And the storm demonstrated that the government was ill-prepared to serve their needs immediately afterward — much less to develop strategies to ameliorate those risks in advance. President Obama has asked Congress to approve $60 billion in aid for the region. How much of that will go to those who were struggling before the storm is anyone’s guess.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Sandy’s aftermath: Economy, jobs, housing hit hard — but for how long?

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